


a slow voice on a wave of phase

by Saxifactumterritum



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fluff, M/M, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-10-04 07:37:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20467400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saxifactumterritum/pseuds/Saxifactumterritum
Summary: a long time ago splintersintime on tumblr replied to my begging for prompts with ‘Please would you consider a McShep soulmates / soulmarks fic? Because for me, there can never be enough soulmark fic’ so here is my attempt at that





	a slow voice on a wave of phase

R odney Mckay at five is stocky, stood on the grey-green carpet before the big heavy desk, record player and big speakers on top. He climbs onto the chair dragged there and carefully repositions the needle, climbing down again and standing, looking up at the speakers as David Bowie’s  _ Starman  _ crackles to life again. He stares, enrapt, his hands opening and closing as if over the notes, head tipped back, his blond curls spilling around his face and turning him angelic. 

(his parents would disagree with this picture-perfect image) 

(they’re not home, today, and Rodney can play the record over and over, climbing up and down from the chair)

The song makes him grow three sizes, bigger and bigger, holding hands with giants and floating. He’s huge, here listening to this song he’s grown so big his lungs are whole worlds, like the Iron Giant from the cartoon, hands around his cupped for warmth, breath blown over his fingers hot and close, arms around him. He feels love, his own arms around his shoulders, listening to the song. He doesn’t understand the yearning in it, a reach for something that he is too confident he’ll one day grasp. His longing is for this; to be held, to be close, to be loved. 

* * *

Rodney likes to run down the hallways of the big house his aunt has. It’s not in Toronto, in Toronto the light’s all wrong and the hallways are too short and the streets too crowded; he can’t see. At his aunt’s house when he runs he can hear faint laughter from the shadow that runs alongside him, outstrips him, loves to run until Rodney’s chasing, breathless, catching the joy of the slight boy who paces him through his life. They pace each other; a ghostly patina of light like sun through leaves in the woods behind his aunt’s house. He crawls through the grass, the itch on his skin unpleasant but worth it to see the way Fibonacci sequences appear in nature, held in abeyance, the patterns of growing things spill numbers around him until he has to lie on his back, dogs with him, breathless and happy. Summers are long.

* * *

The world spins past the car window, Rodney’s cheek pressed to the cold glass, sunshine thickening, twisting him out of his body and out into the universe, unspooling. To love like this is, he knows with a ten year old’s certainty, exquisite. He can taste it, honey on his tongue like the yellow-gold of the light. If he closes his eyes he can hear water, walk among the trees, smell growing things, brush his fingers against the leaves and flowers and every winding stem, he loves things that grow. It seems so profound, life just bursting out. 

(his parents do not understand when he cried over the boy in his class who broke all the plants as they walked, snatching at things as he went by) 

(his parents shout a lot, sometimes about Rodney being too odd) 

(Rodney makes it worse)

Rodney loves. He revels in it, wrapping his arms tight around his accurate soft replica of a Troodon dinosaur. He had to get it made special, he couldn’t find one anywhere. He’s pretty sure these were smart dinosaurs. His favourite dinosaur is a Stegosaurus, one of the dumbest. He feels an odd kinship with them, even though he’s smarter than anyone. He loves Stegosauruses, loves the sunshine, loves riding in the car like this tuning out his parents arguing and just flying. 

* * *

When Rodney understands everything about the universe, it will feel good. Like this; like lying on his back in the park at the end of his street, Jeannie playing over by the swings with her friends, their parents away - It’s summer and there’s sunshine, it’s too hot. So hot the air feels dense, like someone lying beside him, breathing. If he focuses on his breathing and then follows the spirals, follows the numbers until he can feel everything, he can, ever so carefully, knit his fingers into someone else’s. 

  
  


II

Rodney doesn’t remember where he is, why he’s here, or what he’s supposed to be doing. He lies in the snow and stares up at the too-bright sun and wonders why he isn’t colder. Somewhere very distant he knows it’s cold, but it’s a long way away. His lips are chapped and there’s snow uncomfortably clumping around his face, his skin feels stiff and fragile at once, the sun hurting his eyes, the world crackling around him like ice. There are no clouds, just relentless light, white and merciless. He stares up into the pale sky and thinks there might be birds, there, wheeling up high with the wind, more and more and more birds, a murmuration. 

He watches the black flecks of them against the sun, turning as one, moving across wave after wave, always renewing itself, a möbius of birds. He’s never seen one, it seems out of place, he can’t remember why though. He pushes his hands into the hard-packed snow and gasps at the sensation, tipping his head back, the crunch of it ratcheting through him, dragging him away from the birds. They leave an imprint on his retinas like he’s been staring into the sun. He tries to move, but he can’t, his body is too heavy. He looks up at the sky and everything flickers, birds passing across like flecks on a camera lens, the implacable sun dappling as if there are trees. He blinks, eyes sinking closed for long moments before dragging back open against ice-crystals, but the dappling is still there, something settling around him. Someone’s arms encircling him. Love he forgot he felt.

He’s dying. 

He forgets that, watching the flickering light, watching the murmuration. The light flares around them and the dark spots oscillate. Dr Carson Becket told him about murmurations, so many starlings, too many to count, the beat of their small wings turning to a susurration. Rodney can hear it, the soft shushing of the wings, of breathing not his own, warmth packed around him. The flecks on the sky turn to marks on his eyes and his blinks again, the slow fall and drag back, his skin all frost and ice. His breath freezes before he gets it and he’s drowning in it, burning in ice, among a flock of starlings, in someone’s arms. The dots on his eyes don’t go away, they kaleidoscope like he’s pressed his thumbs into his eyelids and his skin hurts, stretched, cracking like the air. 

The birds are turning thicker, drawing together, and the soft shushing of their wings is growling, roaring as they come down, bearing down on him. He gasps, over and over, desperate to breathe, propellers disturbing the snow and kicking up water and showering him in ice. Aliens come climbing down, scattering in light across the snow, long and thin and wavering against the sun. Rodney watches them ascend on him, all of them shouting, and then someone else comes. Someone he’s sure he knows, though the hands that grab him are unfamiliar, big and hard and far, far away, his skin miles and miles thick and so thin and fragile he breaks to pieces in this rough hold. 

“You’re gonna be alright, dr McKay, just hang on.”

He wants to tell them all he’s dead long ago, buried in the ice still burning, but he’s started to shiver and everything hurts and his tears are frozen on his cheeks. The cold is coming back and he remembers, now, feeling so cold. He’s wrapped in crackling silver and tipped into a new position, lifted. The hands drifts away and he wants that back, he knows that guy, he’s sure he does. He’s loaded into the belly of the starling and they rise in lazy loops, up and up and up into the bleak sky. 

* * *

The curtain around Rodney’s bed is dragged back in a rush and someone in a flight-suit, a helmet under an arm, hair a complete mess, comes shoving in like he owns the place. Rodney’s eyes drift closed and when he manages to drag them open again, the intruder is standing over him, grinning widely. 

“You’re looking pinker,” he says. 

“Were you needing something, Major?” Carson says, bustling around the bed, clearly disapproving of this major coming barging in. 

Now that he’s here, though, Rodney knows he’s the man who came in the snow. His hands look too small to have been the ones that gripped Rodney, strong and sure. It’s him, though, there is no question. Rodney stares at him, and the major stares back, head tilted to one side, still with that absurd grin. 

“Just thought I’d check on our ice-pop,” he says. “I’m headed back to McMurdo, taking general what’s his name out again. Short visit.”

“O’Neil,” Elizabeth provides. She seems off-kilter by this intrusion. Rodney finds he quite likes having eccentric visitors. He blinks. 

“Looking good,” the major says, patting Rodney’s arm. Yes, this is him, these are his hands afterall, his touch is familiar. 

“He’ll be good as new after some rest,” Carson says, bustling again, his doctorly tutting sending the major back toward the curtain. 

“Good news,” the major says, disappearing through the curtains again after snapping off a salute in Rodney’s direction and sending him a dazzlingly wacky smile. 

Then he’s gone. Rodney goes back to sleep.

* * *

The major shows up in Rodney’s office, up top, the small cluster of rooms that make up the unclassified peak of their iceberg. Rodney explains how busy and important he is, learns that the major is Major John Sheppard of the USAF, disgraced pilot, and that he is decidedly not busy and not important. Rodney gives in and takes him to the breakroom for coffee. Giving in, it turns out, is what he does a lot of. Sheppard seems to have been tipped as go-to-guy for taxi runs out here, now, and he keeps on sauntering into Rodney’s office, and Rodney always goes with him, always gives in. He feels, somehow, like they’ve always done this, that he’s known this man forever. 

III

Rodney dreams. He dreams of John, walking out of the white sun,  _ there you are _ he says, every time.  _ There you are _ , hands cradling Rodney’s face, smile soft and wide and welcoming. He dreams of closing his eyes and falling into golden meadows, lying on his back with John’s hand in his. He dreams of oceans, so deep he doesn’t need to breathe, holding John in the embrace of the water. He dreams that he is held, that he loves, that he is loved, and he wakes to dappled light and glimpses. The brush of someone’s life against his own. He wants to take it with him out into the cold emptiness of space. To hold on tight. 

But Major John Sheppard  _ likes  _ it in Antarctica. 

(the find he has the gene when General O’Neil, in a moment of idle boredom, starts checking the pilots who bring him out to the installation) 

(they find out the strength of the Ancient gene when Jack brings him onto the installation, uncaring of protocol and NDA’s, handing out clearance like candy, and he has a sit down in the chair because he got tired of standing)

(they find out that he has refused to sign an NDA and does not want a new assignment) 

(no one can persuade him otherwise)

(Elizabeth says  _ Jack even offered to get his black mark scrubbed _ , she says  _ Major Sheppard is bound and determined to stay in Antarctica for some God forsaken reason _ , she says w _ e need him if we are going to succeed _ , and she sends Rodney) 

He and John sit in John’s rooms on the base, John sat on the bed and Rodney in the fold-up kitchen chair. Rodney doesn’t ask why and John doesn’t tell him, they talk about comics and movies and experimental physics. 

“I like it here,” John says, mouth tight and eyes too full of pain for Rodney to meet. He meets them anyway. “I get to fly. I resigned myself to this, I made my peace.”

“It’s worth it, I swear. It’s beyond imagining,” Rodney says. 

“I’ve done it before, signed my life away for the duty, for my friends, with faith,” John says. “My duty wasn’t enough, my friends are dead, and I haven’t got any faith. I just found a little peace.”

(Rodney doesn’t have an answer to that)

(he has got an answer, but he can’t reach across)

* * *

John’s sat in Rodney’s window in Colorado Springs, legs drawn up, gazing out, tucked into a thick, ugly sweater. There’s not much of a view, Rodney knows, just the alley and another stubby grey apartment block. The Pegasus Expedition are back at the SGC to prep, and John’s been sent state-side on medical leave after his ‘cold’ turned out to be pneumonia after he ignored it for too long. He’s mostly over it, he came out to visit Rodney for a few days once he was mostly recovered, he just coughs now, and looks frailer and sadder. Rodney’s working from home, his laptop set up at the kitchen table. They’ve spent the last eight months emailing, talking on the phone, Rodney supposedly trying to get him to sign up to the Pegasus Mission but, honestly, he gave up on that a while ago. Now they are, somehow, just friends. Good friends. John presses his face to his knees and starts in on the coughing. 

Rodney goes to the kitchen and clatters about with the dishes until John’s done. He makes a cup of the gross tea John likes and pours honey in, taking the horrible thing through when John’s subsided to noisy, slightly wheezy breathing. 

“Oh, thanks,” John says, lighting up at the mug of tea, wrapping his hands around it. He’s wearing fingerless gloves in rainbow colors that he is adamant were a gift and not something he’d pick out himself. 

“I have this weird urge to take care of you,” Rodney says, waving a hand in a meaningless gesture. 

“Weird,” John agrees. 

“You say you’re better now but you sound like death,” Rodney points out, crossing his arms. 

“I should never have found you,” John says, voice wistful, absent. 

“What? Are you even listening to me? Found me? You didn’t find me, I gave you my address,” Rodney says. 

“In the snow. You wandered away from the crash-site. We found Captain Hall no trouble, but you? You were gone. There’d been enough snow-fall to cover your tracks, you were covered over enough that we couldn’t spot you,” John says. 

“How did you find me?” Rodney asks. He doesn’t remember walking away from the crash. He never asked any questions. 

“I don’t know,” John breathes, staring up at Rodney like he holds the answers to the universe. He probably does. Most of them, anyway. “You were just… there. You’re always just there.”

“Scientific,” Rodney grumbles, moving close enough that John can lean against him. 

“You quiet the world,” John whispers. 

IX

_ If John sits in the wind, it feels like flying. It always felt like flying, even before he could - his hair blown about, flurries tugging his clothes and throwing up the landscape around him. Felt like love. He sits on the hill and tosses a coin, flicks it and watches it turn, over and over, light glinting, landing in his palm. Perfect, skin-warm. He covers it on the back of his hand and takes a breath, readying himself for the clamour and bluster of embracing life. He has already given himself over to it, as soon as he found the frozen Doctor Rodney McKay (PhD PhD Phd), his own Captain America coming out of the ice.  _

_ (his coin lands on tails)  _

_ (if he lived by fate alone, he’d be headed back to Antarctica)  _

  
  



End file.
